Former employees from 3 media juggernauts have launched a Kickstarter to bring public access TV online

A new Kickstarter project from former New York Times, Vox Media, and VICE employees is setting out to create public access TV for the digital age.

Alexandra Serio, a former employee of SFX, Kareem Ahmed, formerly at The New York Times, and Max Nelson, a former employee at Vox Media, all met while working at VICE Media. They realized public access TV didn’t really have an online equivalent, and set out to create their own.

The NYC.TV team from left to right: Max Nelson, Alexandra Serio, and Kareem Ahmed.Photo by Meredith Jenks

The idea was to promote, distribute and market video content that was made by New Yorkers, whether that was a web series or a feature-length film.

“There’s nothing that’s really locally invested in the creative communities for large metropolitan centers,” Serio explained to Business Insider in a phone interview. “It’s invested in New York community of creators, but it also has, we think, global appeal.”

They’re calling the project NYC.TV and are launching in New York with future plans to expand to LA and — perhaps one day — the world.

The Kickstarter page launched on Thursday and is seeking a first round of community funding with the majority going directly back to creators. Of the $50,000 they’re hoping to raise on the crowdsourcing platform, 70% will help fund new content for NYC.TV and be given to video creators, 20% will go towards marketing, and 10% will be invested in improving the website and covering technology costs.

NYC.TV is also seeking a seed fund in addition to the Kickstarter page, which would cover the daily business operations costs.

What the trio believes really sets NYC.TV apart from the traditional media model they're eschewing is that instead of driving people back to a website, the videos will be hosted across all kinds of online video platforms.

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NYC.TV/KickstarterExamples of the types of programming NYC.TV plans to feature.

“We’re not trying to send people to a website specifically, we think that model doesn’t work very well any more,” Nelson said. “We’ll have a website for our content to live on, but we’ll also have content where people already go.”

Serio, Ahmed, and Nelson realized that a better alternative would be to showcase NYC.TV creators’ videos everywhere they possibly could, from Facebook to Youtube — websites where people already are watching and discovering videos daily — but under the NYC.TV umbrella.

“All of us have worked for major media companies and we realized there’s a new phase of production,” Ahmed said. “It used to be pre-production, production, and then post-production and that was all that a video maker would have to do. But now there’s a ‘post-post-production,’ which is the work of distributing the film.”

And that’s where NYC.TV would come in and help the video creators market and gain a following for their art.

There will also be a website, but Serio explained to Business Insider that will serve more as a portfolio for the types of videos NYC.TV features rather than a place people would have to visit every day to discover new content — this will ensure the videos will be seen by more people across platforms.

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NYC.TV/KickstarterNYC.TV will also make in-house original content, too.

The team also said there will be no pre-roll or banner ads on the videos — something they think viewers will appreciate.

Serio added that NYC.TV will be making an effort to discover new videos and producers. In addition to original in-house programming, NYC.TV will find and work with creators as well as take submissions that a curatorial board will review.

“The submission model is very important to us,” she told BI. “We want to make it clear that you should submit your content. We’re programming for the people, by the people. We’re really there to showcase stories that need to be told that are other people’s babies — we just want to elevate them and create an audience for them.”